Wearing her gold high-stop sneakers, Lena Gunja, 10, originally from Congo and who had been living in Portland, Maine, follows her family as they approach an unofficial border crossing with Quebec while walking down Roxham Road in Champlain, N.Y., Monday, Aug. 7, 2017. (AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

The government agencies tasked with speedily processing the tens of thousands of people who have crossed illegally into Canada to make asylum claims are dropping the ball big time, a new Auditor General of Canada report reveals.

The three agencies – Canada Border Services Agency; Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada; and the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada – “did not process asylum claims in an efficient and timely manner,” the report released Tuesday concludes.

Back in December 2012, the Conservative government set a mandatory timeline that said most asylum claimants – whether they were regular or illegal crossers – had to have hearings within 60 days. Now the timelines have become so clogged that applicants typically won’t receive answers for two years.

As if that isn’t bad enough, it’s only set to get worse. “We project that if the number of new asylum claimants remains steady at around 50,000 per year, the wait time for protection decisions will increase to five years by 2024 – more than double the current wait time,” the report states.

There are a number of factors behind this inefficient system. Money is a big one. The report explains that “the 2012 reforms set the system’s funding at a ceiling sufficient to process 22,500 claims per year, and temporary funding was later provided to increase the capacity to about 32,000. Yet there were 55,000 asylum claims in 2018 alone.”

Then there is the basic fact that the feds have done little to stop or discourage people from crossing illegally into the country in the first place. That said, they’ve recently announced new measures to make it easier to immediately turn away those who have previously made a claim in the United States. It’s not yet known what effect, if any, this has had on the influx.

The number of people crossing illegally into Canada skyrocketed in 2017 and 2018, with approximately 20,000 people each year being intercepted by the RCMP. The 2019 numbers to date show the monthly totals are decreasing, sitting at about half that of the previous year.

While the increase in raw numbers has been well-documented, the AG report also draws attention for the first time to major efficiencies within these agencies.

For example, the agencies continue to share information by paper as opposed to quicker and less expensive digital options. “Even when claim information was available electronically, it was printed out and shared between organizations by fax or courier,” the report notes. “The Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada continued to rely almost exclusively on paper files in its work.” It’s hard to believe any office environment would voluntarily choose to use a fax machine in 2019, yet they do.

They also note that about 400 asylum claimants did not receive biometric security checks, mostly because fingerprints weren’t properly taken or “system errors occurred when information was transmitted.” The report notes that this makes up only 0.5% of all claimants, but still says “checks are important for public safety and the integrity of the refugee determination system.”

One of the biggest problems they identified as contributing to such long waiting periods is that about 65% of hearings get postponed at least once before a decision is made. The bulk of these postponements aren’t made at, say, the request of the applicant’s lawyer. Instead, the top reason was that an immigration and refugee board member was not available to attend the hearing. These sort of staffing matters should be planning and logistics 101.

These inefficiencies aren’t good for anyone. Not for the government, the taxpayer or the asylum claimants themselves. And it seems much of it can be chalked up to shoddy management.

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